Vans just overhauled a 60-year-old brand without touching its logo. Indice built a new identity from a sofa. Both came out clearer. Most rebrands don’t—because the teams behind them skip the strategic question and go straight to visual decisions.

Two recent projects make the same argument from completely different angles: the brands that come out of a rebrand stronger are the ones that used the redesign process to figure out what they actually stand for in culture, then built a visual system to express that. The ones that don’t do that work end up with a new logo on top of the same old confusion.

A fragmented icon is still fragmented

Vans has one of the most recognizable products in footwear. The silhouette, the checkerboard, the cultural associations with skating and punk and DIY—none of that needed to be invented. What London studio Accept Proceed found when they started working on the brand’s visual and conceptual overhaul was that the product was iconic, but the brand system was not. As It’s Nice That reports, multiple ownership eras had left Vans with a fragmented brand identity that didn’t match the clarity of the shoe itself.

The studio’s response wasn’t to redesign the logo or chase a new aesthetic. They started by asking what genuinely made Vans recognizably Vans—stripping the brand back to its core ingredients before touching anything. What they found was a brand built on participation: people had always customized Vans, adopted them, used them as a medium for self-expression. The north star they landed on, “Our Canvas. Your Way.,” isn’t a tagline so much as a structural principle. It defined what stays fixed in the system and what can flex.

The typography move is worth noting specifically. Accept Proceed introduced Pitch Mono as a supporting typeface alongside Vans’ existing Fann Doren family, and placed greater emphasis on Fann Doren’s condensed styles for consistency—but they deliberately didn’t overhaul what was already there. They clarified it. That restraint is harder than it looks and more valuable than a wholesale replacement would have been.

The bigger conceptual shift was this: Accept Proceed stopped thinking of Vans as a skate brand. They started thinking of it as “a brand built around a spirit of creative possibility,” as creative director Stephen Heath puts it. That reframe is what allowed the system to honor skateboarding’s roots while making room for new audiences and new sports—without feeling like it was abandoning anyone.

When the store itself becomes the brief

Adoratorio Studio’s rebrand for Indice, a designer eyewear boutique marking its tenth anniversary, solves a different problem but uses the same underlying logic. As It’s Nice That describes, Indice wanted to move beyond being labeled a retailer and establish itself as a cultural reference point in the niche luxury-eyewear market—not just a place where glasses are sold, but a brand people want to belong to.

Adoratorio’s entry point was the store’s physical interior. They renamed the space “The Eyewear Lounge,” which immediately repositioned the brand away from the sterile, clinical language that tends to follow eyewear and luxury retail. The lounge concept—tied to slowness, intimacy, and conversation—gave the visual system a genuine source to draw from rather than a mood board assembled from category conventions.

The new logo came directly from the De Sede sofa inside the store. The letterforms merge and flow into each other, prioritizing feeling over immediate legibility—and, as Adoratorio co-founder Camilla Zampolini notes, it coincidentally resembles an eyelash. The color palette pulled from the butter-yellow walls and metallic-grey shelving. Film-grain photography and bold condensed type completed a system that feels like a natural extension of the physical space rather than a graphic stamp applied from outside.

That last distinction matters. Adoratorio wasn’t designing for Indice—they were designing from it. The visual language emerged from what the brand already was at its best, made legible and consistent.

The pattern both rebrands share

Strip away the specifics and both projects are doing the same thing: they started with a strategic question about cultural role before making a single visual decision.

For Vans, the question was: what has this brand always meant to the people who love it, and how do we build a system that honors that without freezing it in one subculture’s past? For Indice, it was: what kind of experience does this store actually create, and how do we make the brand feel like that even when someone encounters it outside the store?

Both answers led to restraint. Neither team blew up what existed. They clarified it, gave it structure, and created room for the brand to grow without losing what made it worth caring about.

What this means if your brand needs a refresh

If your brand has been around long enough to accumulate equity—loyal customers, real associations, a reputation in your market—the risk of a rebrand isn’t that it will fail to look new. The risk is that it will trade something real for something merely current.

Before any visual work starts, there are a few concrete signals that tell you the problem is strategic, not cosmetic. If your team can’t agree on one sentence describing what your brand means to your best customers, that’s a foundation problem, not a logo problem. If your visual assets look noticeably different across your website, packaging, and social media without a deliberate reason—different type treatments, inconsistent color usage, varying tones of voice—you have a brand system problem, not a design problem. And if your brand is strongly associated with one audience or era but you’re actively serving new ones, the visual system probably hasn’t caught up to where the business actually is. Any one of these conditions means a logo refresh will feel hollow. All three together mean the rebrand conversation needs to start much earlier in the process.

The brands that come out of a refresh stronger are the ones that can answer a clear question before the design work starts: what role do we play in the lives of our customers, and what does that look like expressed consistently? The visual system is how you prove the answer.

For established businesses thinking about this kind of work, our graphic design and branding process starts with that strategic question—not what the new logo should look like, but what the brand needs to communicate and to whom. The visual decisions follow from that, and they’re better for it.

Both the Vans and Indice projects also show that a rebrand doesn’t have to mean erasure. Vans kept its logo essentially intact. Indice drew its new identity from furniture already in the room. The most durable refreshes work with existing equity rather than against it—they make what’s already true about a brand easier to see.

That’s the job. Not to make a brand look new. To make it legible.